THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2007Freelance programmer says key to pricing is understanding risk involved
by Jeremy Schnitker |
| Ambrose |
| Photo by: James Duncan Davidson |
Freelance software developer
Craig Ambrose has accrued bundles of knowledge about freelancing in his ten years working as a soloist. So he's decided to share much of that information via his
Freelancing on Rails podcast.
Ambrose, who works from Auckland, New Zealand, focuses much of his practice on the Ruby on Rails web application.
His podcasts deal with a wide variety practical issues that confront freelancers, topics such as contract agreements, client building, networking and estimating projects. One that stands out the most to him is personal branding.
"Building a good personal brand, both on the Internet, in particular development communities [such as the ruby on rails community], and in the minds of your colleagues is much more important that which accounting program you use or how many hours you work," he said.
Ambrose also focuses a great deal on pricing and estimating projects during the podcasts.
"Most freelance programmers have some experience as employees before they try freelancing," he said, "and their employers should have been asking them for estimates, and providing them with an opportunity to improve their estimates by feeding back the actual time taken into the next round of estimates."
Quoting isn't any harder than estimating, Ambrose said, but it can be difficult to decide how accurate an estimate can be. He said that when working with new software programs it may be tough to gauge how much time you're going to spend on a project.
"It's a little tricky for Rails developers at the moment because most of us have not being doing rails development for too long. My estimation experience in salaried positions is all in other [software] languages, so I was faced with learning how to estimate rails projects, at the same time as having to risk money by offering fixed quotes. However, this is an obstacle that programmers face each time we try a new technology. By and large, we suck at it, but we are certainly going to be better at it than our customers are, so it's our responsibility to try our best to produce good estimates, and to improve them as we go."
He said once you can figure out an estimate, the main thing left with quoting is understanding how much risk you're going to take on a project.
"My advice is to keep it small by breaking up the project and gauging how long all the support tasks [communicating with a client, quality assurance] take, which perhaps you didn't perform as a salaried employee.
"Personally, my advice is to not worry about it too much, just dive in," he said. "Take on a small project with no more than a month of risk. Get yourself in a good life position where you can handle a dip in your income without your house being repossessed, and have a shot. I made pretty large loss on my first project, and so did most people that I've spoken to. It's bloody great fun though, and eventually you'll get it all running smoothly."
With regards to pricing for programming projects, Ambrose recommended Kent Beck's
Extreme Programming Explained.
The Freelancing on Rails podcast is also available on iTunes.
Filed Under:
Programming 
